I like the idea of using 74xx or whatever as has already been stated you will experience all kinds of problems and learn a great deal. By all means then move on and implement the same logic in CPLD's etc.

I wish we had been able to do this as students.

I remember an exercise which was to implement a design using asynchronous logic, it was a pain to design and should not have worked, failed to work when simulated, but actuall worked when physically built. Now thst would have been interesting to have seen with programmable logic.